Climate change

[Zelandakh]

Exactly, although Europe is dealing with this while the US isn't. The problem now is India/China as well as the US.

This goes to some extent to the crux of the problem ahead. About 150 or so pages back I posted that we have the technology already available for a solution in the form of aeroforming devices, commonly known as artificial trees. The issue is more about who pays and who benefits from the contracts in constructing new technologies relating to the solutions implemented. As an example, if you assume a complete solution and compute costs based on the last year's emissions per land then India and China are indeed problematic. This is the USA's preferred metric. If you instead compute those costs including historical emissions on a per capita basis then the share from India and China is tiny. This would be China's preferred model. Until there is some agreement about what the fairest way of implementing costs might be there can be no complete solution. I am genuinely not that worried though, certainly much less than most left-wing media sources, as I am confident that a technological solution is available should it prove to be required and it will be many years yet before a tipping point is reached that will force more drastic measures.

[johnu]

‘I Wouldn’t Have Wasted My Time’ On Trump At UN Summit, Greta Thunberg Says

 

The alleged leader of the free world had enough time between watching Fox Propaganda programs that kowtow to him that he recently tweeted insults about the Swedish teenage climate change activist.

 

Asked what she would have said to the president if they had spoken, Thunberg said: “Honestly, I don’t think I would have said anything because obviously he’s not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me?

 

“So I probably wouldn’t have said anything, I wouldn’t have wasted my time,” she said.

To be fair to President Impeached, besides climate change experts, he doesn't listen to military or intelligence experts, foreign affairs experts, trade experts, or economic experts because he knows more than all of them. He is the smartest guy in the room (well, that would be one of the White House Throne rooms B-) )

[hrothgar]

I'm going to miss marsupials...

[johnu]

Is the world cooling down? B-)

 

No Surprise, 2019 Was The Second-Hottest Year On Record

 

“2019 has been another exceptionally warm year, in fact the second warmest globally in our dataset, with many of the individual months breaking records,” Carlo Buontempo, the head of C3S, said in a statement.

 

Only 2016 was hotter, but just by a razor-thin margin of 0.04 degree Celsius. The 2010s were also the warmest decade on record, researchers noted.

Only the 2nd warmest year in history? There must be a cooling trend from the hottest year in history that the climate change deniers can come up with. Obviously the world is not warming enough to have the hottest year on record :rolleyes:

[y66]

From A Very Hot Year by Bill McKibben at NY Review of Books:

 

This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra’s air into the dirtiest on the planet. The temperatures across the continent broke records—one day, the average high was above 107 degrees, and the humidity so low that forests simply exploded into flames. The photos of the disaster were like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, with crowds gathered on beaches under blood-red skies, wading into the water as their only refuge from the flames licking nearby. But such scenes are only a chaotic reminder of what is now happening every hour of every day. This year wouldn’t have begun in such a conflagration if 2019 hadn’t been an extremely hot year on our planet—the second-hottest on record, and the hottest without a big El Niño event to help boost temperatures. And we can expect those numbers to be eclipsed as the decade goes on. Indeed, in mid-February the temperature at the Argentine research station on the Antarctic Peninsula hit 65 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing the old record for the entire continent.

 

It is far too late to stop global warming, but these next ten years seem as if they may be our last chance to limit the chaos. If there’s good news, it’s that 2019 was also a hot year politically, with the largest mass demonstrations about climate change taking place around the world.

 

We learned a great deal about the current state of the climate system in December, thanks to the annual confluence of the two most important events in the climate calendar: the UN Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which met for the twenty-fifth time, this year in Madrid (it ended in a dispiriting semi-collapse), and the American Geophysical Union conference, which convened in San Francisco to listen to the newest data from researchers around the world. That latest news should help ground us as we enter this next, critical phase of the crisis.

 

The first piece of information emerged from a backward look at the accuracy of the models that scientists have been using to predict the warming of the earth. I wrote the Review’s first article about climate change in 1988, some months after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that what we then called the “greenhouse effect” was both real and underway. Even then, the basic mechanics of the problem were indisputable: burn coal and oil and gas and you emit carbon dioxide, whose molecular structure traps heat in the atmosphere.

 

Human activity was also spewing other gases with the same effect (methane, most importantly); it seemed clear the temperature would go up. But how much and how fast this would occur was a bewildering problem, involving calculations of myriad interactions across land and sea; we came to fear climate change in the 1980s largely because we finally had the computing power to model it. Critics—many of them mobilized by the fossil fuel industry—attacked those models as crude approximations of nature, and insisted they’d missed some negative feedback loop (the effect of clouds was a common candidate) that would surely moderate the warming.

 

These climate models got their first real chance to shine in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, injecting known amounts of various chemicals into the atmosphere, and the models passed with flying colors, accurately predicting the short-term cooling those chemicals produced. But the critique never completely died away, and remains a staple of the shrinking band of climate deniers. In December Zeke Hausfather, a UC Berkeley climate researcher, published a paper showing that the models that guided the early years of the climate debate were surprisingly accurate. “The warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago,” he said. “This really gives us more confidence that today’s models are getting things largely right as well.”1

 

We now know that government and university labs were not the only ones predicting the climatic future: over the last five years, great investigative reporting by, among others, the Pulitzer-winning website InsideClimate News unearthed the large-scale investigations carried out in the 1980s by oil companies. Exxon, for instance, got the problem right: one of the graphs their researchers produced predicted with uncanny accuracy what the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration would be in 2019. That this knowledge did not stop the industry from its all-out decades-long war to prevent change is a fact to which we will return.

 

The rise in temperature should convince any fair-minded critic of the peril we face, and it is worth noting that in December one longtime skeptic, the libertarian writer Ronald Bailey, published a sort of mea culpa in Reason magazine. In 1992, at the first Earth Summit in Rio, he’d mourned that the United States government was “officially buying into the notion that ‘global warming’ is a serious environmental problem,” even as “more and more scientific evidence accumulates showing that the threat of global warming is overblown.” Over the years, Bailey had promoted many possible challenges to scientific orthodoxy—for example, the claim of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen that, as mentioned, clouds would prevent any dangerous rise in temperature—but, to his credit, in his new article he writes:

 

I have unhappily concluded, based on the balance of the evidence, that climate change is proceeding faster and is worse than I had earlier judged it to be…. Most of the evidence points toward a significantly warmer world by the end of the century.

If scientists correctly judged the magnitude of the warming—about one degree Celsius, globally averaged, thus far—they were less perceptive about the magnitude of the impact. Given that this infusion of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a large-scale experiment never carried out before during human history, or indeed primate evolution, it’s not really fair to complain, but many scientists, conservative by nature, did underestimate the rate and severity of the consequences that would come with the early stages of warming. As a result, the motto for those studying the real-world effects of the heating is probably “Faster Than Expected.”

 

The warmth we’ve added to the atmosphere—the heat equivalent, each day, of 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs—is already producing truly dire effects, decades or even centuries ahead of schedule. We’ve lost more than half the summer sea ice in the Arctic; coral reefs have begun to collapse, convincing researchers that we’re likely to lose virtually all of them by mid-century; sea-level rise is accelerating; and the planet’s hydrologic cycle—the way water moves around the planet—has been seriously disrupted. Warmer air increases evaporation, thus drought in arid areas and as a side effect the fires raging in places like California and Australia. The air also holds more water vapor, which tends to drop back to earth in wet places, increasing the risk of flooding: America has recently experienced the rainiest twelve months in its recorded history.

 

In late November a European-led team analyzed what they described as nine major tipping points—involving the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the boreal forests and permafrost layer of the north, and the Amazon rainforest and corals of the tropical latitudes. What they found was that the risk of “abrupt and irreversible changes” was much higher than previous researchers had believed, and that exceeding critical points in one system increases the risk of speeding past others—for instance, melting of Arctic sea ice increases the chance of seriously slowing the ocean currents that transport heat north from the equator, which in turn disrupt monsoons. “What we’re talking about is a point of no return,” Will Steffen, one of the researchers, told reporters. Earth won’t be the same old world “with just a bit more heat or a bit more rainfall. It’s a cascading process that gets out of control.”

 

That all of this has happened with one degree of warming makes clear that the targets set in the Paris climate accords—to try to hold temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and no more than 2 degrees—are not “safe” in any usual sense of the word. Already, according to an Oxfam report released in December,3 people are three times more likely to be displaced from their homes by cyclones, floods, or fires than by wars. Most of those people, of course, did nothing to cause the crisis from which they suffer; the same is true for those feeling the health effects of climate change, which a December report from the World Health Organization said was “potentially the greatest health threat of the 21st century.”

 

What’s worse, we’re nowhere close to meeting even those modest goals we set in Paris. Indeed, the most depressing news from December is that the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases rose yet again. Coal use has declined dramatically, especially in the developed world—the US has closed hundreds of coal-burning plants since 2010 and halved the amount of power generated by coal. But it’s mostly been replaced by natural gas, which produces not only carbon dioxide but also methane, so our emissions are barely budging; in Asia, continued fast-paced economic growth is outstripping even the accelerating deployment of renewable energy.

 

The United Nations Environment Programme released its latest annual report on the so-called emissions gap in December, and it was remarkably dire. To meet the Paris goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world would need to cut its emissions by 7.6 percent annually for the next decade.4 Stop and read that number again—it’s almost incomprehensibly large. No individual country, not to mention the planet, has ever cut emissions at that rate for a single year, much less a continuous decade. And yet that’s the inexorable mathematics of climate change. Had we started cutting when scientists set off the alarm, in the mid-1990s, the necessary cuts would have been a percent or two each year. A modest tax on carbon might well have sufficed to achieve that kind of reduction. But—thanks in no small part to the obstruction of the fossil fuel industry, which, as we have seen above, knew exactly what havoc it was courting—we didn’t start correcting the course of the supertanker that is our global economy. Instead, we went dead ahead: humans have released more carbon dioxide since Hansen’s congressional testimony than in all of history before.

 

That we have any chance at all of achieving any of these targets rests on the progress made by engineers in recent years—they’ve cut the price of renewable energy so decisively that the basic course is pretty clear. Essentially, we need to electrify everything we do, and produce that electricity from the sun and wind, which are now the cheapest ways to produce power around the world.5 Happily, storage batteries for the power thus generated are also dropping quickly in cost, and electric cars grow both more useful and more popular by the month—Tesla is the brand name we know, but the Chinese are already rolling out electric cars in large numbers, and, better yet, electric buses, which could lead to dramatically cleaner and quieter cities. In his State of the City address in early February, New York mayor Bill DeBlasio announced that every vehicle in the city fleet would be electrified in the years ahead. Despite such dramatic announcements, we’re adopting none of these technologies fast enough. In seventy-five years the world will probably run on sun and wind because they are so cheap, but if we wait for economics alone to do the job, it will be a broken world.

 

Radically speeding up that transition is the goal of the various Green New Deal policies that have emerged over the last year, beginning in the US, where the youthful Sunrise Movement recruited Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an early supporter and used a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to draw attention to the legislation. Negotiations have been underway ever since about the exact shape of such a program, but its outlines are clear: extensive support for renewables, with an aim of making America’s electricity supply carbon-neutral by 2030, and a program to make homes and buildings far more efficient, coupled with large-scale social plans like universal health care and free college tuition. At first glance, combining all these goals may seem to make the task harder, but advocates like Naomi Klein have argued persuasively that the opposite is true.

 

The wide scope of the proposed Green New Deal may make it sound utopian—but it may be better to think of it as anti-dystopian, an alternative to the libertarian hyper-individualism that has left us with economically insecure communities whose divisions will be easy for the powerful to exploit on a degrading planet, where the UN expects as many as a billion climate refugees by 2050. A million Syrian refugees to Europe (driven in part by the deep drought that helped spark the civil war) and a million Central American refugees to our southern border (driven in part by relentless drought in Honduras and Guatemala) have unhinged the politics of both continents; imagine multiplying that by five hundred.

 

On the campaign trail, the Democratic nominees have mostly embraced the Green New Deal. Its sweeping economic and social ambition fits easily with the other campaign promises of Senators Sanders and Warren, but most of the rest of the field has also backed its promises of dramatic reductions in carbon emissions. For instance, Joe Biden’s climate plan says that “the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths”—first, that “the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition…to meet the scope of this challenge,” and second, that “our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.” Biden has waffled and wavered on the practicalities, at times endorsing a continued reliance on natural gas, but it’s pretty clear that, whoever the eventual nominee, the party will be at least somewhat more progressive on climate issues than in the past. And in one way the nominee will be more progressive even than the Green New Deal legislation. Sanders, Warren, Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and others have all called for an end to oil, gas, and coal production on public lands—something a new president could do by executive action. Some have gone farther, calling for an end to fracking across the nation.

 

These so-called Keep It in the Ground policies are less popular with labor unions that want to keep building pipelines, and therefore those writing the Green New Deal legislation have not yet included them in their bill, wary of losing congressional support. But the mathematical case for such action was greatly strengthened in November with the publication of the first production gap report, intended as a counterpart to the emissions gap research I described above. For almost thirty years, global warming efforts have focused on controlling and reducing the use of fossil fuel—which is hard, because there are billions of users. But in recent years activists and academics have looked harder at trying to regulate the production of coal, gas, and oil in the first place, reasoning that if it stayed beneath the soil, it would ipso facto not be warming the planet.

 

The first edition of this new report, issued by a consortium of researchers led by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the UN Environment Programme, makes for startling reading: between now and 2030 the world’s nations plan on producing 120 percent more coal, gas, and oil than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and 50 percent more than would let us meet even the 2 degree goal.6 That’s more coal and oil and gas than the world’s nations have told the UN they plan to burn: “As a consequence, the production gap is wider than the emissions gap.” “Indeed,” the authors write, “though many governments plan to decrease their emissions, they are signalling the opposite when it comes to fossil fuel production, with plans and projections for expansion.” Another way to look at it, as the Financial Times calculated in February, is that to meet the 1.5 degree target, the fossil fuel industry would have to leave 84 percent of its known reserves in the ground, writing off their value.

 

You would think that, compared with the billions of users, it would be easier to take on the handful of petro-states and oil companies that produce fossil fuel; after all, more than half of global emissions since 1988 “can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities,” according to the Climate Accountability Institute. By definition, those are among the most powerful players in our economic and political systems, and so far they’ve been able to escape any effective regulation. At the very top of the list is the United States, which, according to a December report from the Global Gas and Oil Network, is on track to produce four-fifths of the new supply of oil and gas over the next half decade.

 

Partly, this is the result of President Trump’s fanatical effort to eliminate any obstacles to new oil and gas production, including recently opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—the nation’s largest wildlife preserve—to drilling. But there’s a fairly long lag time in building the necessary infrastructure—the fracking boom really had its roots in the Obama administration, as the former president boasted in a 2018 speech at Rice University in Texas. “I know we’re in oil country,” he told the cheering crowd. “You wouldn’t always know it, but [production] went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly, America’s, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas…that was me, people,” he said. “Just say thank you please.”

 

The one cheerful development of the past year has been the continuing rise of a global climate movement, exemplified by the young activists who brought seven million people into the streets for global climate strikes in September. (Greta Thunberg is the best known, and rightly celebrated for her poise, but fortunately there are thousands of Gretas across the planet offering provocative challenges to their local officials.) The question is where to aim all that activism. The natural impulse is to direct it at our political leaders, because in a rational world they would be the ones making decisions and shaping change. This is part of the answer—it’s crucial that this year’s election in the US has the climate crisis at its center, and thanks to the Green New Deal that’s a real possibility.

 

But political change is uncertain—despite the remarkable activism of Extinction Rebellion across the UK, December’s elections there seemed little affected by the issue—and even when it comes it is slow. A new president and a new Senate would still mean a Washington rusted by influence and inertia. And winning this battle one national capitol at a time is a daunting challenge given the short time physics is allowing us.

 

A small but growing number of activists are also looking at a second set of targets—not Washington, but Wall Street. Over the past few years a mammoth divestment campaign has persuaded endowments and portfolios worth $12 trillion to sell their stocks in coal, oil, or gas companies, and now that effort is expanding to include the financial institutions (mostly banks, asset managers, and insurance companies) that provide the money that keeps those companies growing. A handful of American banks—Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—are the biggest culprits, and incredibly they have increased their lending to fossil fuel companies in the years since the Paris accords. Take Chase Bank, which is the champion in this respect: in the last three years it has provided $196 billion to the fossil fuel industry. If Exxon is a carbon heavy, in other words, Chase is too (and in many ways they’re joined at the hip; Standard Oil heir David Rockefeller led Chase to its current prominence, and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond is its lead independent director).

 

This financing—which has included supporting the most extreme oil and gas projects, like the huge pipelines planned in Canada’s uniquely filthy tar sands complex—is perhaps the single least defensible part of the fossil fuel enterprise. You can almost understand the refusal of oil companies to shift their business plans: they really only know how to do one thing. But banks can lend their money in a thousand different directions; they don’t need to fund the apocalypse. Given the trouble banks have already caused, it’s no wonder that environmentalists have begun using the phrase “Make Them Pay”—or at the very least make them invest in the renewables and conservation measures desperately needed to get us on the right track. My colleague at the grassroots campaign 350.org Tamara Toles O’Laughlin has compared this kind of funding to nineteenth-century support by financial institutions of slavery—it’s not the same crime, of course, but “the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds.” It’s no surprise that the same demand for reparations—compensation for all those whose lives and communities are being wrecked—is being raised.

 

There’s no question that taking on one of the biggest parts of the planet’s economy is a daunting task. It’s possible that the Chases of the world can go on lending money to their friends in the oil industry without suffering any consequences. On the other hand, in the same way that the electoral map favors Republicans, the money map favors those who care about the climate. Chase branches, for instance, are concentrated in those small pockets of blue around our big cities (I was arrested in a protest in one of them, in Washington, D.C., in early January). And perhaps these institutions are beginning to bend: in mid-January the world’s largest financial firm, BlackRock, announced that it was taking broad, if still tentative, steps to include climate change in its analyses of potential investments. “Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” its CEO, Larry Fink, wrote in a letter to CEOs of the world’s largest corporations. That’s perhaps the most encouraging news about climate change since the signing of the Paris climate accords, because if these pillars of global capital could somehow be persuaded to act, that action could conceivably be both swift and global.

 

Anything is worth a try at this point, because we’re very nearly out of time.

[y66]

From The bell is tolling on Heathrow expansion (Feb 28):

 

In the biggest victory ever won by environmental campaigners in Britain the court of appeal yesterday declared that the long disputed third runway at Heathrow is illegal. The government had failed to adequately consider its own commitments to tackle the climate crisis and the pledges it made to the Paris climate agreement – which is to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

[johnu]

Warmest winter on record gives way to extra-early signs of spring

 

If this winter season was not very wintery where you live, you're certainly not alone — that was the experience for most of the people in the Northern Hemisphere. According to NOAA, the winter of 2019-2020 was the warmest on record across all continents north of the equator.

The warmth has been even more astonishing in Europe. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe just experienced its warmest winter on record by far — 6 degrees Fahrenheit above normal — shattering the old record by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Record hot air from the White House denying the potential for a meltdown from the Coronavirus pandemic contributed by raising the average temperatures at least a degree.

[johnu]

CLIMATE CHANGE OVER

 

At a roundtable discussion about the wildfires, California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot said Trump’s focus on forest management was obscuring the grim reality that climate change was behind the historically high temperatures and years of drought.

 

“It will start getting cooler. You just watch,” Trump fired back at Crowfoot

I don't see how anybody can disagree with that "argument". The Grifter in Chief said the virus would disappear in the heat of summer in the early days of coronavirus. The Manchurian President would never lie, so it is obvious that cool spring and summer temperatures this year are the only reason coronavirus didn't disappear but actually got worse in the last 6 months. I fully expect that the Stable Genius will unleash campaign ads blaming the 200K deaths from coronavirus on Global Cooling and climate change activists who have tried to stop Global Warming.

[Richbart]

This video (filmed in Ireland last year) is almost an hour but what he has to say is backed up by some rather compelling long term evidence.

The organisation he founded has won the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge award.

Oh! We are told by our esteemed leaders that climate change is fake news. I recently saw a video of DJT assuring scientists “that is will get cooler soon,very quickly.”

[johnu]

Earth has warmest September on record, and 2020 may clinch hottest year

[thepossum]

Earth has warmest September on record, and 2020 may clinch hottest year

 

 

EDIT apologies for not putting a hyperlink but the image has a URL at www.climate.gov

[johnu]

The article was more detailed and said

 

The planet just recorded its hottest September since at least 1880

 

But your graph does reinforce one fact. The world is currently seeing temperature changes that have rarely been seen in the history of the planet.

[thepossum]

The article was more detailed and said

 

 

 

But your graph does reinforce one fact. The world is currently seeing temperature changes that have rarely been seen in the history of the planet.

 

Indeed and heading towards some alarming type of temperatures and conditions

 

Come to think of it. September is a fairly recent invention is it not, or could it be argued to exist millions of years ago

[y66]

After many years of failure to launch, new companies and technologies have brought geothermal out of its doldrums, to the point that it may finally be ready to scale up and become a major player in clean energy. In fact, if its more enthusiastic backers are correct, geothermal may hold the key to making 100 percent clean electricity available to everyone in the world. And as a bonus, it’s an opportunity for the struggling oil and gas industry to put its capital and skills to work on something that won’t degrade the planet.

 

Vik Rao, former chief technology officer at Halliburton, the oil field service giant, recently told the geothermal blog Heat Beat, “geothermal is no longer a niche play. It’s scalable, potentially in a highly material way. Scalability gets the attention of the [oil services] industry.”

 

In this post, I’m going to cover technologies meant to mine heat deep from the Earth, which can then be used as direct heat for communities, to generate electricity, or to do both through “cogeneration” of heat and electricity. (Note that ground-source heat pumps, which take advantage of steady shallow-earth temperatures to heat buildings or groups of buildings, are sometimes included among geothermal technologies, but I’m going to leave them aside for a separate post.)

 

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical

[Zelandakh]

Come to think of it. September is a fairly recent invention is it not, or could it be argued to exist millions of years ago

This is a little like arguing that trilobites are a recent invention, since the name has only existed since 1771.

[PassedOut]

'Sleeping giant' Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find

 

High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.

 

The slope sediments in the Arctic contain a huge quantity of frozen methane and other gases – known as hydrates. Methane has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years. The United States Geological Survey has previously listed Arctic hydrate destabilisation as one of four most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change.

 

The international team onboard the Russian research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh said most of the bubbles were currently dissolving in the water but methane levels at the surface were four to eight times what would normally be expected and this was venting into the atmosphere.

We can tamp down CO₂ emissions, and we should, but the warming already in progress will get a lot worse before it gets better.

[johnu]

July 2021 Was Officially The Hottest Month On Record

 

Between the wildfires, the floods, the draughts and the hurricane, it was hard to ignore climate change in July, which now has the unfortunate distinction of being the hottest month on record.

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday that last month saw the highest temperatures since record keeping began 142 years ago.

 

The combined land and ocean surface temperature was 1.67 degrees Fahrenheit (or 0.93 degree Celsius) above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees Fahrenheit (or 15.8 degrees Celsius). The hottest month on record had previously been tied between July 2016, July 2019 and July 2020, according to the NOAA.

 

The picture is particularly bleak for the Northern Hemisphere, where the land temperature was 2.77 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.54 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.

 

What an amazing "coincidence" that the previous 3 hottest months are all in the last 6 years. What are the odds of that happening?

[thepossum]

But what I don't understand is. All these headlines are ... the hottest something since a few years ago

[kenberg]

But what I don't understand is. All these headlines are ... the hottest something since a few years ago

 

Actually I think the report was that this last July was the hottest July on record, or maybe the hottest any month on record. But I am not sure if this is for the US or what.

 

I am fine with not jumping to conclusions and I certainly have not studied the issue with sufficient depth to hold my own in a debate. Still, I strongly advise against a dismissive attitude. The world population is some 7.6 billion and many of the adults drive cars. Without an ounce of evidence, a person might worry about the long term effect. Same with burning coal, same with cutting down forests. Why on earth would anyone think these things will not have an effect?

 

And the evidence, as accepted by a great many scientists, is that it is having an effect.

 

So we have a problem. And we have a responsibility to address it.

[thepossum]

Hi Ken

 

Of course. Sometimes my attitude doesn't communicate well 🙂

[Gilithin]

Actually I think the report was that this last July was the hottest July on record, or maybe the hottest any month on record. But I am not sure if this is for the US or what.

According to the NOAA data it is only the 13th hottest for the USA and the 6th warmest month for North America as a whole. In their data record (142 years) it is the hottest for Asia and for the world. Some others - Europe 2nd, Africa 7th, South America 10th, Oceania "Top 10". I have not yet seen anything released for Antarctica or for the oceans but logic dictates that they are both likely to be lower since the Northern Hemisphere land-only figure was higher than the average.

 

It is worth noting that this is not the largest temperature anomaly in the NOAA dataset but as it is the largest anomaly for July, and July is the warmest month, it works out 0.01C warmer than the previous maxima. Sceptics are already pointing to satellite data that supposedly (I have not checked) shows a lower anomaly but obviously you will not see those claims reported in MSM channels. What is clear is that it was a very hot month globally however you want to spin it. Whether it was really the hottest is, I think, uncertain. There is no way that our current measurements are really accurate to 2 decimal places. And things are even less certain when you go to the 2000 year mark as several media outlets have confidently reported; but headlines are headlines.

 

Personally I am less interested in whether things are getting warmer (they surely are) but rather how fast, ie what the sensitivity factor is. The evidence seems to suggest (to me at least) that the real value is a little lower than the majority of the IPCC-approved models are currently using. There seems to be some reluctance in re-calibrating though, which I personally find disappointing. You go where the scientific data takes you, not where the money wants you to be.

[y66]

Fun fact: yesterday German wind power produced more electricity than French nuclear. And French wind produced more than German nuclear!

[Cyberyeti]

But what I don't understand is. All these headlines are ... the hottest something since a few years ago

 

For heat yes (although we are getting some "highest ever" events, the problem here is flooding where you're getting "once in 150 years" flooding events 3 times in 10 years in some places. It's clear something is changing fast.

[Gilithin]

It's clear something is changing fast.

About 3cm per year. Whether that is "fast" probably depends on where you live - historically "fast" would be a good description. The "something" is a combination of ice melt and thermal expansion.

[Cyberyeti]

About 3cm per year. Whether that is "fast" probably depends on where you live - historically "fast" would be a good description. The "something" is a combination of ice melt and thermal expansion.

 

The overall amount is not what's the issue here, it's just that 3 months worth falls in a day